Nicholas Thompson

Editor of The New Yorker. Co-founder of The Atavist. Contributor at CBS News.

Discussion

Hi. I'm Nicholas Thompson, the editor of The New Yorker's Website, which publishes about fifteen new stories a day to go along with the pieces that run in the magazine. I'm also a co-founder of the software company, The Atavist, and a contributor on CBS, where I talk about technology. Happy to answer any questions!

@eriktorenberg Hi! Thanks for asking. I actually think it's a pretty great job to be a developer here. They sit right with the edit team and we all spend a ton of time working through how to get people to --read---. How do you design a site that makes it easy for people to find stories and read them from beginning to end? How do you build apps that do the same thing? What other, new and exciting things can we build that present information and stories in new ways? I love our tech team ...

Hey @nxthompson -
Is the Atavist business model working? What went wrong with Atavist books? Is there ever any conflicts working for The New Yorker and Atavist? What's your preference for being pitched stories for the site?

@jeffumbro Lots of good questions there! The Atavist is actually doing really well. September is going to be the best month of growth ever for the platform (both in percentage growth and in total number of users.) And I think August was the best month prior to that. People are using the software to make all kinds of stories and all kinds of projects.

@jeffumbro On Atavist Books, the project may just have been ahead of its time? I have no doubt that one day people will read complex, layered multi-media books. And the ones that Atavist put out were amazing. (Did you read the Karen Russell? https://magazine.atavist.com/sto...). But as IAC said when they closed it down, the market "has yet to emerge."

@jeffumbro for pitching stories, i like relatively short pitches that very clearly state what the story is and why the author is the person to write it. And, also, if i don't know the author, I need clips that convince me they will do a great job.

Thanks for doing this!
I'm curious to hear your take on the future of ebooks. Sales have stabilized (and possibly are shrinking), and they're pretty much digital copies of paper books. Do you see ebooks becoming their own medium, and evolving away from the constraints of paper? Where do you think the opportunities are?

@nbashaw Thank you!
You know, I'm kind of surprised by the flattening sales of ebooks. I think a lot of it probably has to do with the fact that, generally, when we try to read ebooks it's in environments with lots of distractions. If you try to read a book on a tablet, email or Facebook is just a click away and it becomes harder to concentrate. So I think a lot of people download books, realize they're not really reading them, and then stop downloading them. Will that change? Yes, i think we'll train ourselves, and i think we are, even now, training ourselves to be less distracted. And I think devices will probably get better at helping you focus. (I think Apple should build a service on an iPad that shuts off your email and social media, perhaps behind password protection like the program Freedom, that you can turn on when you read books.) As for the opportunity, I do think immersive multimedia story-telling has a bright future in the book industry. I mean, look at the Atavist magazine stories, which have great readership numbers. It'll just take a little while.

@eriktorenberg This is a hard question. But one issue on which my opinions have changed massively has been my view of the leadership of The Catholic Church, and of Christian leaders more generally. Watching this Pope—his love, his forgiveness, his move to situate religious belief as something that happens inside of nature and not above it—has been extraordinary.

@eriktorenberg I'm completely fascinated by how the GOP primary plays out. Right now, it's being led by three people with no political experience. My instinct is that Marco Rubio ends up being the establishment/insider/experienced GOP candidate and that he moves up in the polls and then shoots to the top once people start to vote. But unlike a lot of other people analyzing the race, I don't think it's impossible that one of the three outsiders could end up being the nominee. Nor do i think that Jeb is totally cooked.

@eriktorenberg well, I think a lot of people in the New York literary world are scared of social media and of technology generally. If you don't use, say Facebook or Twitter, they can seem like utterly inane time sinks, and they're actually amazing ways of connecting with people around the world and of organizing information. As for the tech side, I think there's sometimes a lack of respect for literature and anything that seems in any sense "old."

@ellenhuerta I can't wait to start Larissa MacFargquhar's "Stranger's Drowning" and I just finished Ta-Nehisi Coates's Beyond The World and Me. Right before that, I finished the utterly brilliant "Savage Detectives" by Roberto Bolano, which was one of the best novels I've ever read.

@jacqvon Well, as everyone knows, people are moving ever-more-rapidly to mobile devices. So how do we optimize reading The New Yorker through them, while still making enough money to pay our writers, fact checkers, etc... How much is through apps? How much do we need to change the reading experience on the mobile web itself? What is going to happen with Facebook Instant and Apple News and Flipboard and Google Play News? We're figuring out strategies for all this, which is exciting but complicated.

@andrewmettinger I was just thinking yesterday about a variation on this: what are three technological devices that have unambiguously and completely made life better. A phone, for example, doesn't count. It does make life better, but it's also partially annoying. The same goes for almost everything. But my three winners are my Roomba Vacuum cleaner (it's just great, particularly if you have toddlers), EZ Pass, and Quinciple Food delivery. I am completely in favor of all of them!

Good question! One thing that has helped me when I'm writing is to focus intensely on reading people who write better than I do. When I was writing my book, I would often, while suffering from writer's block, sit down with the work of someone whose prose was amazing. (It helped in this sense that one of my two main characters was George Kennan, who's a beautiful stylist and who, in one sense, was always challenging me to write better through his own books and letters.) And I also read everything out loud, which helps. Plus I try to read Strunk and White once a year.